Photographic reproduction of Dotheboys Hall, Bowes, 1841

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Dotheboys Hall is the brutal Yorkshire school run by the evil Wackford Squeers depicted in Charles Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby. This image, a photographic reproduction of an original drawing made in 1841, depicts the real school – Bowes Academy in Yorkshire – that inspired Dickens. Here, the school looks fairly unremarkable, but newspaper reports, letters from parents, and Dickens’s novel all provide a more vivid picture of the treatment and living conditions inside.

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Photographic reproduction of Dotheboys Hall, Bowes, 1841. [from the author's presentation copy of The Life of Dickens, 1872-74]

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